RCMP making ‘some progress’ in probe of deadly siege in Algeria

Soldiers stand at the entrance to an Algerian gas plant Jan. 31, 2013, as the Algerian government shows the site of a recent hostage crisis to journalists for the first time.

Photograph by: The Associated Press
, Postmedia News

Two Mounties on the ground in Algeria are making “some progress” in their efforts to verify claims that a couple of Canadians had a role in a deadly gas plant attack in that country, a senior law enforcement official said late Friday.

While investigators have not been able to get access to bodies or key documents, they are discussing “coordination and cooperation” with Algerian authorities.

“We feel a lot better than when we got there,” the official told Postmedia News.

The official acknowledged that Algeria is dealing with many priorities in the wake of the four-day siege last month at the In Amenas facility that left 37 hostages and 29 militants dead. Algerians have allowed representatives of some countries where the victims were from to get access to the bodies, the official said. The dead hostages included workers from Japan, the Philippines, the U.S. and Britain. None were from Canada.

“We’re not the only country knocking on their door,” the official said. Not wanting to jeopardize the case, the official declined to go into detail about the challenges RCMP investigators are facing or what they’re doing to try to authenticate the claims, which were made by Algeria’s prime minister.

Scott Stewart, a former U.S. State Department special agent, suggested in an interview that investigators could run into additional challenges, including fake identity documents, poorly collected evidence and badly decomposed bodies.

“When I was an agent, I worked a case on a jihadi suspect — he had 23 separate identities in his apartment,” Stewart said. “They’re encouraged to commit document fraud.”

Sometimes, they will pick up and alter documents from their dead brethren, said Stewart, now a vice president at Stratfor, a private global intelligence firm in Austin, Texas.

It could also be that the militants in the Algeria attack were not carrying any documents on them at all, which, in the remote north African Sahel desert, is a very real possibility.

Further, if the attackers’ bodies were badly damaged or decomposed, that could be making it difficult to compare fingerprints and photographs.

Investigators are also likely dealing with authorities who don’t have the most sophisticated capabilities for evidence collection, Stewart said.

“It’s not like this happened in London and they’re trying to deal with Scotland Yard.”

Experts said Canadian intelligence officials are likely liaising with their counterparts in the U.S., Britain and France on this file in case it turns out there’s a network operating out of several countries.

Often times there are linkages, Stewart said. “You find out guy ‘x’ lived in Mississauga, who talked to guy ‘y’ in Brooklyn, who talked to guy ‘z’ in London,” he said.

At a daily briefing Friday, a U.S. State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said that the FBI was investigating the plant attack but did not offer any new information about what agents have found.

There have been conflicting accounts about the supposed Canadian militants. The Algerian prime minister reportedly said the Canadians were of Arab descent. However, a Wall Street Journal story cited three plant employees who recalled a “bearded, blond militant” assisting the ringleader of the group. That ringleader at one point boasted of the man’s Canadian origins, one of the employees said.

An official for the Canadian federal government would only say Friday that authorities were still “trying to get any relevant information” to verify the claims of a Canadian connection.

The fact that there is no verification after almost two weeks may suggest the “smoking gun wasn’t quite as smoking or can suggest there’s something genuine to the story” and officials are intentionally saying little so they can pursue their investigative work, said Christian Leuprecht, a fellow at the Centre for International and Defence Policy at Queen’s University and political science professor at Royal Military College.

If investigators do uncover a network, they’ll want to “hit everyone at the same time across multiple countries,” like a good drug operation, Leuprecht said.

A report by Reuters this week said U.S. intelligence officials were becoming concerned about “growing indications” that Westerners were travelling abroad to join militant factions “as part of a radicalization process.”

However, Leuprecht said officials need to be careful not to make sweeping conclusions from a single incident and feed an “American paranoia that our borders are insecure and everything bad comes from Canada.”

That said, acknowledged statements last year by Richard Fadden, director of Canada’s spy agency, before a Senate committee, in which he stated that CSIS was “aware of at least 45 Canadians, possibly as many as 60” who have travelled or attempted to travel from Canada to Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen to join al-Qaida-affiliated organizations and engage in terrorism-related activities.

“Clearly these individuals represent a threat both to the international community and to Canada, as some have or may eventually return to Canada after having acquired terrorism training or even having engaged directly in acts of terrorism,” Fadden said.

An Associated Press report on Friday said the U.S. was struggling to deal with the new threats from Islamic extremists spreading across north Africa, where intelligence is not as well developed.

But concerns about growing threats in the region are not new.

In November 2011, a working group of the Global Counter Terrorism Forum met to discuss security concerns in the Sahel. Co-chaired by Canada and Algeria, the working group heard from a variety of experts about the region’s porous borders, lack of coordination between security services, “growing links between regional terrorist organizations” and that “terrorism in the Sahel is global, not regional,” according to a summary report.

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